Linux partition setup

[scaryjeff]

I have a 20 gig drive on which I plan to run a dual boot setup with win98SE and Red Hat 7.2. I want to give linux (the first) 8 gigs and windows 12 (I have never used linux before so I don't want to dedicate too much of my space to it). At the moment the drive is FAT32, and I was wondering how I should prepare the drive for linux. I have downloaded the two ISO files for RH7, and intend to write them to CD. I can back up all my files on another drive and format the 20 gig one so I can do what I like to the drive, but do I need to do something special to get linux to install? Will it work if I DOS format the drive or format the drive as FAT32 then just stick RH7 disk 1 in and reboot? Or do I have to completely remove the partition and let RH setup do it all for me? Also is it easy to tell RH that I don't want it taking up the whole drive?

Thanks for any help.

 

[neuralfx]

hey all, havent posted here in awhile .. Go ahead and delete the partitions you already have (you could resize but you said you dont mind doing it this way), ya with dos fdisk, make a primary partition about 12 gigs, format it, install win98 on that. Then go ahead and pop ur RH7.2 cd in there, 8gigs is plenty for your redhat, or any distro. The GUI installer is really pretty straight forward, the installer has a disk partitioning utility called Disk Druid, linux needs at the very least 2 partitions, a SWAP (as opposed to a swap file) and a root partition called / (this is comparable to c:, but makes more sense), for ur swap, generally the rule is 1.5 or 2x your memory, you can make the / partition fill up the remaining space, there are other ways to partition, this is the simplest. Make sure you install LILO (LInux LOader) to the MBR, this should setup ur 98 to be in lilo.conf and all that good stuff .. well good luck ..
-neural